News

Every year mountains of delicious and nutritious fruit are rejected before reaching shop shelves be-cause of their superficial imperfections. Snact, a social enterprise set up in London in 2013 by two lifelong friends, Ilana and Michael, tackles the very roots of the problem by turning that surplus into deliciously sustainable snacks.

We’re delighted to say that Snact have decided to join the Sustainable Bridges community, so we decided to sit down and speak with their Co-Founder Michael to find out about all things Snact!

Michael Minch-Dixon:

Snact started with Ilana and Michael collecting surplus fruit at London wholesale markets and making fruit jerky in a rented kitchen. Since then our team has grown to four members, including Ashley and Marta who support on sales and marketing respectively. Today we are excited to be joining Sustainable Bridges as the next step in our journey towards a more sustainable future!

Our signature product is fruit jerky, a dried blended fruit snack currently available in three flavours: Apple & Mango, Apple & Raspberry, and the latest addition to the family, Apple, Blueberry & Banana. We don’t use any concentrates, additives or preservatives, just 100% fruit, so it is vegan, gluten free, low calorie, and it counts towards your five a day. Good fruit jerky needs good flavours, not good looks, so it is made of ugly and unwanted fruit which we buy directly from British farmers at fair prices. The fruit is then blended into a smoothie, dried and cut into fruit jerky by hand on a family farm in Kent.

Apart from a tasty and healthy product we offer an opportunity to turn snacking into Snactivism: making an everyday action into a positive act towards a better food system. By using surplus apples, which make up a large chunk of the 2 million tonnes of fruit and vegetables wasted every year, we are taking a big bite out of the UK’s food waste. By the end of this year we will have saved 50 tonnes of fruit, which is equivalent to 480 London double-decker buses. This has been possible thanks to our customers, or Snactivists – people who have an appetite for reducing food waste the tasty way!

In September 2016 we’re very proud to be launching 100% home compostable packaging – the first of its kind in the UK – which will help us reduce waste even further. Since our inception we’ve been trying to come up with a way to package our products sustainably. Our new packaging, developed by Israeli start-up Tipa, is just as durable and impermeable as ordinary plastic, but it biologically de-composes within 180 days and becomes a fertiliser for soil, behaving similarly to an orange peel. It is a big step in making our business sustainable in every way, reducing plastic waste as well as food waste.

Snact started with Ilana and Michael collecting surplus fruit at London wholesale markets and making fruit jerky in a rented kitchen. Since then our team has grown to four members, including Ashley and Marta who support on sales and marketing respectively. Today we are excited to be joining Sustainable Bridges as the next step in our journey towards a more sustainable future!